A I provokes more competing narratives than any technology in history — not b ecause people disagree about the facts\, but because they are asking differ ent questions about jobs\, power\, truth\, safety\, the environment\, and h uman meaning\, all at once. In “AI Through Dragonfly Eyes\,” Anthea Roberts maps nine narratives about AI — three pairs that look at the same phenomenon from opposite sides\, plus three st andalone losses the entire gains frame is structurally blind to — then push es beyond mapping to ask why the disagreements persist. Many turn out to be about scale: both sides empirically grounded\, measuring at different leve ls of analysis. Structural feedback loops explain why some positions are an alytically sound but politically losing. And certain losses persist across every plausible future because they are features of AI itself\, not of any particular political settlement.
The project also embodies what it st udies. Roberts is building multi-agent AI systems — orchestrating dozens of specialised agents to research\, map\, synthesise\, and monitor across all nine narratives simultaneously — because the complexity of the debate now exceeds what any individual mind can hold in view. In the process\, she is discovering how agentic AI is transforming the nature of scholarly and anal ytical work itself: what it means to research when agents can process hundr eds of sources in parallel\, what it means to write when the machine can dr aft but cannot think\, and what new capabilities emerge when human judgment directs AI systems designed for compound vision rather than single-lens an swers.
Co-sponsored by the HLS Center on the Legal Profession\, the B erkman Klein Center for Internet and Society\, and the Library Innovation L ab. Light snacks will be served. T his event is open to HUID holders only.
Anthea Roberts\, a Profess or at the School of Regulation and Global Governance at the Australian Nati onal University (ANU)\, is an interdisciplinary researcher and legal schola r who focuses on new ways of thinking about complex and evolving global fie lds. Her research areas include international law\, trade and investment\, the effect of geopolitical change on global governance\, and understanding and navigating complex systems. Anthea is the Director of the ANU Centre fo r International Governance and Justice and chairs the ANU Working Group on Geoeconomics. She formerly taught at the London School of Economics\, Colum bia Law School and Harvard Law School.
In 2019\, the League of Schola rs named Anthea the world’s leading international law scholar and Australia ’s leading law scholar. Her new book Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins\, Who Loses\, and Why it Matters (2021\, co-authored with Nicolas Lamp) with Harvard University Press was listed as one of the Best Books of the Year b y the Financial Times and Fortune Magazine. Anthea’s first book Is Internat ional Law International? (2017) won numerous prizes\, including the America n Society of International Law’s Book Prize\, and was Oxford University Pre ss’s top-selling law monograph worldwide in 2017-2018. She is currently wor king on projects relating to complexity\, risk and resilience.
CATEGORIES:Discussion LOCATION:Berkman Klein Multipurpose Room (Room 515) GEO:0.000000;0.000000 ORGANIZER;CN="Dana Walters":MAILTO:dwalters@law.harvard.edu URL;VALUE=URI:https://hls.harvard.edu/events/agentic-ai-and-complex-decisio n-making-how-to-think-like-a-dragonfly/ END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 DTSTART:20260308T070000 TZNAME:EDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR